Do you consider the Wii part of this generation?

[The Ghost of RubangB]

WereKitten said:

The Ghost of RubangB said:

But generations are strictly historical terms.  They refer to history.  They've already been decided.  This isn't about your own logic or your own philosophy, or even your own opinion.  It's like saying "I think the 1960s were actually in the 1850s.  It's just my opinion, lol."

"Well look guys, the way I see it, the Dark Ages is a term to refer to any time without light, so all of history was the Dark Ages until the invention of electricity (the Enlightenment).  And every night when I turn the lights out I'm living in the Dark Ages for a few hours."

"Industrial Revolutions are what happens when one industry goes around the whole planet, so satellites and the internet are Industrial Revolutions, but factories and steam engines are not."

This drew a smile. But it's a strawman argument.

When discussing technology a "generation" is not an historical term. A "generation" in technology is defined by technical criteria. The definition of a technological generation is usually born in restrospect, and by consensus among the specialists.

A "second generation web search engine" or a "third generation nuclear power plant" are such because of how they work, not of when they came out. Of course as technology progresses the chronological order is usually respected. But when technology branches it's entirely possible to have the platypusses of this taxonomy.

Coming to consoles, I am not sure of when exactly someone thought it was useful to group them in "generations". Is that wikipedia link the only authoritative source? We surely didn't talk of "third generation" when the NES was out. We talked of 16-bit computing and 8-bit consoles, and they were poor but still technical criteria.

And if it has no technical content, what is its sense? Business wise I already explained why I don't think it makes much sense to put the Wii in the same category as the other consoles.

I'm only referring to console gaming history, in which generation has become a historical term, the way we talk about generations of human history, not generations of technical change.  I don't remember when people started numbering them though.  It started out as a technical term, as you mentioned, the way it works in most other tech-related contexts, with an 8-bit generation and a 16-bit generation, but as systems got more powerful, the differences between them became too great, so this terminology became obsolete.  If we still used the terms that way we'd have the GBA, the DS, the PS2, the XBox, the Wii, and the PS3 in 5 or 6 different generations instead of 2, and not in chronological order.  So to stay relevant, these terms have evolved into their other non-tech-related definition, as a way to reference time periods when a particular wave of competing products were released.  It's either that or we call this the Wii/DS generation, and the last one the PS2/GBA generation.

It might be a bad idea for a word, but it seems like the majority of the gaming community has accepted it this way.  I can't find anybody on the internet explaining the history of the historical terminology, but every website I find mentioning generations of gaming history use the terms this way, save for the occassional argument like this one, which is inspired entirely by "true next gen experience!" buzz words from marketing teams.  And we definitely can't let marketing teams redefine our history, especially the marketing teams behind the 2nd and 3rd place products.

For gaming, I think it should be a historical term, because the future will look back and remember the Wii trouncing the 360 and the PS3 while they were all on shelves at the same time.  In 20 years nobody will be saying "but but but it was in the wrong generation" the same way nobody today says that about the inferior PS2 or inferior DS or inferior NES.